Guardia civil bust criminal organisation dedicated to vehicle theft in Madrid and Toledo

A criminal organisation dedicated to the theft of vehicles, in Madrid and Toledo, for their subsequent manipulation, dismantling and sale as original parts has been busted by the Guardia Civil, as reported on Wednesday, September 28.

The Guardia Civil arrested 16 people belonging to a criminal organisation dedicated to the theft of vehicles, in Madrid and Toledo, for their subsequent manipulation, dismantling and sale as original parts.

In the operation, an unspecified number of stolen motorbike and car frames and engines were seized. In one of the searches carried out, around €35,000 in cash was seized from the criminal offences committed.

Due to the number of vehicles stolen, it is not yet possible to determine the value of all the material seized.

The operation began in April of this year, as a result of a coincidence of information from the police forces, which led to the creation of a joint work team to monitor the alleged perpetrators who were falsifying the documentation and “making up” the vehicles for sale.

As a result of the investigations, the agents were able to determine that the organisation was made up of a first echelon that was in charge of locating and stealing the motorbikes they needed and that they left them parked near the garage of one of the members.

Subsequently, they were brought inside to be completely dismantled and the parts were then taken to another workshop or to a larger warehouse in the province of Toledo for storage and subsequent distribution.

Then, in order to get rid of the remains that they could not use, they contacted other parties involved, who transported all the disposable material in a box truck to scrapyards or junkyards for its total destruction, erasing the chassis number of the motorbikes, in order to eliminate any trace that could locate them.

With these parts and in the same workshop, they assembled the stolen engines in motorbikes of legal origin that they had previously acquired.

In this way, they had a double benefit, that of having the parts they had fitted on motorbikes belonging to people who came to have them repaired and not paying the manufacturer for the parts, since they had been stolen.

They selected the vehicles they were going to steal according to their needs by make and model, either for parts or to sell them once they had been “made up”.

The first phase of the operation, which was carried out in different areas of Madrid, involved the entry and search of five properties, two of them in the homes of the main ringleaders and another two in the workshops where they cut up the motorbikes of different makes, which had previously been stolen, where they hid the different material used and where they carried out the manipulation.

The fifth search took place in the province of Toledo, where a warehouse was inspected and a large quantity of stolen parts were found.

In order to sell the stolen parts, they used several internet profiles where they offered more than 500 products, all of them motorbikes, which after economic analysis, would have a market value of around €300,000.

They have also seized material used to erase the VINs and tools for cutting and cloning keys and making up the frames, as well as frequency inhibitors and blank vehicle documentation.

The operation has been carried out by the GIAT Central of the Traffic Group of the Guardia Civil and the U.I.D. of Hortaleza of the Municipal Police of Madrid.

The operation was carried out with the support of the Guardia Civil’s Madrid and Toledo Command Teams, the SEPRONA Teams and the El Pardo Canine Unit, and the Madrid Municipal Police, the Air Support Section, the Judicial Coordination Unit, the Environmental Unit, the Tetuán District Unit and the UCS, as well as the support of the Labour Inspectorate of the Autonomous Community of Madrid and the province of Toledo.

The news follows reports that a drug trafficking gang operating off the coast of Huelva has been busted by the Guardia Civil, as reported on Wednesday, September 28.

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